An unofficial blog about the National Museum of Health and Medicine (nee the Army Medical Museum) in Silver Spring, MD. Visit for news about the museum, new projects, musing on the history of medicine and neat pictures.

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Friday, February 22, 2013

Why 'Lincoln' should win an Oscar for Best Picture...

...because there's a brief scene of General Daniel Sickles' leg on display at the Medical Museum. Sickles lost his leg at the battle of Gettysburg. The movie is inaccurate as it shows the leg still fully fleshed - which would have stunk amazingly as the flesh decayed off the bone. Instead Museum prepator Schafhirt would have cut and boiled the flesh off, and then wired the bones together so they looked like this picture.

Another scene of a pit of amputated limbs seems to have been influenced by RB Bontecou's photograph "Field Day." And here's the original label for Surgical Photograph 43, Sickle's "Right Tibia and Fibula comminuted by a Cannon Ball."

2 comments:

Sickles stood on that missing leg for the rest of his life. His combat wound warded off any professional consequences for his Gettysburg screwup (who knows how an investigation into his at-best semi-authorized and in any case disastrous move of his III Corps to the Peach Orchard would have played out if he were unwounded and still on active service?). Sickles maintained that his action was not a screwup at all but that it actually saved the battle, and hence the Union. Chutzpah, thy name is Sickles.

The Schafhirt who prepared the specimen for the Army Medical Museum was Frederick Schafhirt (Friedrich Heinrich Gottlieb Schafhirt), who is born in 1814 in Göttingen Germany, come 1847 to Baltomore, worked for Dr. Joseph Leidy at Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Also called as a (co-)founder of the army medical museum in Washington he made 1862 a contract with surgeon general William Alexander Hammond. He worked also for the race theorists Samuel George Morton and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Fred died 1880. Two sons followed his footsteps. Ernest Frederick Schafhirt prepared 1882 Charles J. Guiteau´s bones and Adolph Julian Schafhirt was a pharmacist in Washington DC.

Who are we?

Mike Rhode was the chief archivist of the Museum from 1989-2011, and is the founder of this blog. I maintain an interest in the course of the museum, and will be posting relevant information.

The Army Medical Museum was founded in 1862 during the American Civil War. After World War II, a parent-child relationship was inverted and the Museum became part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Since then, the Museum has moved around Washington, stopping for years in Ford's Theatre, and on the National Mall where the building it shared with the National Library of Medicine once stood, until it was demolished in 1968 for the Hirshhorn Museum. For 35 years it was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and now is in Silver Spring, MD.

So what about that blog name?

It's historical. I found it in a quote from one of the former curators. World War II confirmed the Army Medical Museum's primary role in pathology consultation. James Ash, the curator during the war and a pathologist, noted, "Shortly after the last war, more concerted efforts were instituted to concentrate in the Army Medical Museum the significant pathologic material occurring in Army installations." He closed with the complaint, "We still suffer under the connotation museum, an institution still thought of by many as a repository for bottled monsters and medical curiosities. To be sure, we have such specimens. As is required by law, we maintain an exhibit open to the public, but in war time, at least, the museum per se is the least of our functions, and we like to be thought of as the Army Institute of Pathology, a designation recently authorized by the Surgeon General."

After the war, it evolved into the tri-service Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

Guide to the Collections of the NMHM 2014 (pdf link)

Disclaimer

The opinion or assertions contained herein are the private views of the authors and are not to be construed as official or reflecting the views of the U.S. Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology or the National Museum of Health and Medicine.